topic Re: Removing quotation marks in SAS Programming

Removing quotation marks

AntoineA — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 19:56:12 GMT

Hi,

I have a simple question for you experts.

I have a dataset where all the data are between double quotation marks.

Exemple:

"0.1%"

"0.00123321%"

and "" when there is no value.

How do I remove the quotations marks.

PS. I need to remove them in order to be able to do show descriptive statistics with the proc means function.

Thank you.

Re: Removing quotation marks

PaigeMiller — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 20:01:24 GMT

Use the COMPRESS function

Re: Removing quotation marks

dcruik — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 20:02:54 GMT

You can use the compress() function to do that. The syntax below should help clean up the fields, hope this helps!

newvar=compress(oldvar,'"');

Re: Removing quotation marks

AntoineA — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 21:22:46 GMT

Thank you both,

the compress command would not work for me the output data kept the "".

spread6m99=compress(spread6m,'"');
Instead I tried this:

spread6m99 = substr(spread6m,2,(length(spread6m)-3));
IF spread6m99='"' THEN spread6m99='';

seems to work.

Re: Removing quotation marks

Jagadishkatam — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 00:44:29 GMT

Alternatively try the perl regular expression function

data have;
input string$20.;
string2=prxchange('s/\"//',-1,string);
cards;
"0.1%" 
"0.00123321%"
;

Thanks,

Jag

Re: Removing quotation marks

PaigeMiller — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 11:50:28 GMT

@AntoineA wrote:

Thank you both,

the compress command would not work for me the output data kept the "".

Try this:

newvariable=compress(oldvariable,'"');

That's a little hard to read, but after oldvariable, you type a comma, a single quote, a double quote and then another single quote. This removes the double-quotes from oldvariable, and creates newvariable without the double quotes.

Re: Removing quotation marks

Patrick — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 22:22:34 GMT

How do you get to these strings in quotes in first place?

If it's you reading in some text file then these quotes could already get removed in this extract step.